Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Obama Takes Time Out of his Busy Schedule

“He is said to be a reluctant politician: aloof, insular, diffident,
arrogant, inert, unwilling to jolly his allies along the fairway and
take a 9-iron to his enemies. He doesn’t know anyone in Congress. No one
in the House or in the Senate, no one in foreign capitals fears him. He
gives a great speech, but he doesn’t understand power. He is a poor
executive. Doesn’t it seem as if he hates the job? And so on. This is
the knowing talk on Wall Street, on K Street, on Capitol Hill, in green
rooms — the ‘Morning Joe’ consensus.”

In fact, asked what he wants to accomplish in the next three years — a hanging curve ball of a question — Obama whiffs: “I will measure myself at the end of my presidency in large part by
whether I began the process of rebuilding the middle class and the
ladders into the middle class, and reversing the trend toward economic
bifurcation in this society.” Laudable goals, but to “begin the process
of rebuilding” isn’t exactly a rallying cry, nor concrete enough to be
measured.

Even Remnick, many thousands of words in, refers to him as the “Professor-in-Chief.”

Even though Remnick’s goal is to probe Obama the person, it’s hard to
understand why, given the vast acreage, he didn’t press more on
ObamaCare, given how central that law and its botched rollout is to the
legacy that the president discusses.

One Obama comment that’s gotten some attention has to do with race.
But it’s been selectively quoted by some, while the full observation is
rather unremarkable. “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just
really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black
president,” Obama said. “Now, the flip side of it is there are some
black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me
the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black president.” That,
as Remnick pointed out, is hardly playing the race card. Obama also
invokes Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in defending his insistence on
speaking out about personal responsibility in the African-American
community. The New Yorker piece has also generated headlines about Obama
seeming soft on marijuana — but here too, he straddles the issue. “As
has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad
habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked
as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think
it is more dangerous than alcohol.” The president goes on to say that
minorities disproportionately wind up in jail on pot charges.

About Me

I was born in Tombstone, Arizona, but moved to California in 1959 when labor strikes at the copper mines devastated the Arizona economy. I've been moving north ever since. Pullman is as far north as I care to live and I'm looking toward reversing the drift.